Sunday, July 1, 2012

Actor-turned-auteur Tom
Laughlin first portrayed Billy Jack, a karate-chopping recluse who fights for
righteous causes, in the 1967 biker movie The
Born Losers. Laughlin occupied several behind-the-scenes roles on the
picture but used pseudonyms for directing, producing, and writing—one gets the
impression he wanted to downplay the idea of his movie as an ego trip.
Furthermore, The Born Losers hinted
at Laughlin’s agenda of creating a platform for sharing progressive political
ideas. Combined with the inherently weird nature of the Billy Jack character, a
spiritually enlightened pacifist who solves problems by killing people, The Born Losers revealed that Laughlin
was one complicated cat. However, The
Born Losers was just the overture.

After other, non-Billy Jack projects
fell through, Laughlin returned to his signature role for the 1971 release Billy Jack. In the series’ defining
installment, Billy Jack is the guardian of a hippy-dippy school in rural California,
so when local thugs prey upon the school—going so far as to and murder a Native
American student and rape saintly teacher Jean (played by Delores Taylor, the
real-life Mrs. Laughlin and his constant cinematic collaborator)—Billy Jack springs
into action. He carves his way through a goon squad of redneck locals
determined to undermine Jean’s flower-power educational aspirations, using the
martial art hapkido and the lethal skills he learned while serving as a Green
Beret in Vietnam.

Laughlin stacks the narrative deck, presenting the bad guys
as one-note ogres and the good guys as paragons of virtue, with Billy Jack
occupying a weird middle ground between the opposite poles. The movie is a
disaster politically, arguing that violence is the path to peace, and it’s
strange from a storytelling perspective, with meandering sequences that depict
touchy-feely rap sessions and other with-it school practices. Yet the
cumulative effect of the movie is quite something, one man’s plea
for greater compassion in modern society.

Laughlin also cuts an impressive
figure, dressed in head-to-toe denim and sporting one of the coolest hats in
’70s cinema, a flat-brimmed black cowboy job with a multicolored band. Billy Jack became one of the most
successful independent movies of the era—although originally delivered to
theaters by Warner Bros., the movie was re-released by Laughlin once he
regained distribution rights, and the second time around, Billy Jack did bang-up business. Further sequels therefore became
inevitable, though Laughlin quickly lost sight of what made Billy Jack popular.

For instance, the
next installment, The Trial of Billy Jack,
is a three-hour death march into the surreal wilderness of Laughlin’s
imagination. Weakly framed around vignettes of a hospitalized Jean (Taylor)
recovering from a mysterious incident at the school, the picture weaves
together three primary storylines—Billy Jack’s legal struggles stemming from
the events in the last movie; the ongoing culture clash between the locals and
Jean’s school, which escalates to even greater levels of violence; and,
finally, Billy Jack’s Native American-styled vision quest in the desert.

Although the movie includes a few exciting fight scenes, Laughlin also makes room
for embarrassingly sensitive musical numbers featuring students at Jean’s
school, to say nothing of interminably earnest and repetitive speeches. The Trial of Billy Jack is Billy Jack on steroids, but not
necessarily in a good way—it’s among the most excessive and indulgent movies of
the ’70s, a period not known for cinematic restraint. By the time the threequel
climaxes in a ridiculous bloodbath meant to evoke the historical atrocities of
My Lai and Sand Creek, it’s clear The
Trial of Billy Jack has left the normal realm of human consciousness. Depending
on what you bring to the movie, you’ll either find this singular experience a
heavy trip or a major bummer.

Unfortunately, no such ambiguity is needed when
appraising the final opus in the series, Billy
Jack Goes to Washington, which is wretched. As the title implies, the movie
is a direct remake of the Jimmy Stewart classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). And, yeah, that means we get
to see Billy Jack in a suit, filibustering Congress, which is exactly as awkward and uninteresting as it sounds. Beyond being insipid, Billy Jack Goes to Washington is the
only movie in the series badly marred by technical shortcomings—whereas the
other pictures have a certain kind of swaggering style, Billy Jack Goes to Washington suffers from dodgy sound work, with many scenes featuring distractingly overdubbed dialogue. Unless you’re determined to see every frame of this series, the final film is
to be avoided at all costs.

Given the diminishing returns of the series, it’s unsurprising
Laughlin never completed his proposed fifth entry, The Return of Billy Jack, production on which began and ended
quickly in 1985. But, to his credit, he’s still regularly issuing messages on
his website, circa 2012, claiming that a brand-new Billy Jack picture is in the
works. You’ve been warned.